“I ain’t judgin…”
She got to her feet.
He said, “God damn it, Kendra. I’m willing to make it so you don’t have to handle dis shit alone. Those kids got needs an’ you don’t have to be the only one tryin to meet ’em.”
“Seems to me that I am the only one meeting a need here,” she said. She headed for the doorway, leaving him sitting at the table with her bottle of water.
WHEN THE AUTUMN term began, Joel knew that dodging the occasion of a run-in with Neal and his crew was not going to be enough, especially since Neal and his crew knew exactly where to find him. He tried to vary the route he and Toby took to Middle Row School in the morning, but there was no way to vary the fact of Middle Row School or of Holland Park School either. He knew that he still needed to deal with the issue of Neal Wyatt, not only for himself but for Toby.
For himself, he came up with the knife.
In the long aftermath of the visit paid by the Blade to Edenham Way, everyone but Joel had forgotten about the flick knife that had been sent flying during the melee. Too many things had happened all at once for the household to remember that knife: Toby’s hysterics, Ness bleeding from the head, the Blade being thrown out on his arse, Kendra coping with Ness’s injury…In the midst of all this, the flick knife had gone the way of bad dreams.
Even Joel didn’t remember the knife at first. It was only when he was rescuing a piece of cutlery from beneath the cooker, where he’d accidentally dropped and kicked it while laying the table, that he saw the glint of silver against the wall. He knew at once what it was. He said nothing about it, but when the coast was clear, he went back and, using a long-handled wooden spoon, he scooped it forward. When he had his hands on it, he saw a thin line of his sister’s blood along the blade. So he washed it carefully and when it was dry, he put it under his mattress—right in the middle—where no one was likely to find it.
He had no thought of using it for anything until he overheard his aunt in conversation with Cordie, telling her about her visit with Dix, her umbrage high and her English going to hell accordingly. “He say let ’em sort t’ings out ’emselves,” she was saying, her voice low but the hiss of it unmistakable. “Like I’m s’posed to wait till one of ’em gets beat bad enough to go into hospital wiv a broken skull.”
Joel understood this to mean he and Toby were on their own. He, too, had considered going to Dix for help—as unwise as he knew that would have been—but hearing Kendra and making the correct interpretation, he realised he would need a different plan.
So for himself, the plan was the knife. He fetched it from beneath his mattress and he put it in the rucksack that he carried to school. He’d get into serious trouble if he was caught with at school, but he had no intention of showing it around like someone in need of impressing his schoolmates. He only intended to bring it out if an emergency called for it, and this would be a Neal Wyatt emergency, one in which Neal needed to know what was in store for him if he crossed Joel another time.
That left Joel with the problem of what to do for Toby. He meant to keep a sharp eye on his brother, and he especially meant never again to be late to the Westminster Learning Centre when it was time to fetch him. He meant to hand Toby over to Ness at the child drop-in centre—begging and bargaining for her help if necessary—should there be any occasion when he needed to leave Toby unsupervised. But on the chance that anything wreaked havoc with these carefully laid plans, he needed to have a carefully laid additional plan for Toby as well, one that would kick in automatically should Neal Wyatt appear anywhere near his horizon if he inadvertently found himself alone.
Joel knew Toby would not be able to remember anything complicated. He understood also that, in a moment of fear, Toby might well freeze up altogether, curling into a ball and hoping he might go unnoticed. So he tried to make the plan sound like a game and the game involved hiding like an explorer in a jungle the moment he saw…What? The dinosaurs coming after him? The lions getting ready to pounce on him? Gorillas? Rhinos? Pygmies with poisoned spears? Cannibals?
Joel finally settled on headhunters, which seemed gruesome enough for Toby to remember. He made a shrunken head from a dismembered and unsellable troll doll that he got from the charity shop. He plaited its bright orange hair and drew stitches on its face. He said in reference to it, “This’s what they do, Tobe, and you got to remember,” and he put the severed doll head into his brother’s school rucksack. There were headhunters out there, he told him, and he had to find places to hide from them.
After school, after the learning centre, at the weekends, whenever there was time, Joel took Toby out into the streets and together they found useful shelters. These would be the places Toby would run to if he saw anyone approaching him. The thing about headhunters, Joel told him, was that they looked just like everyone else. They wore disguises. Like those blokes who broke his lava lamp. Did Toby understand that? Yes? Truly?
On Edenham Estate, they practised dashing for the rubbish area where there was just enough space behind two wheelie bins for Toby to squeeze himself till he heard Joel call out that the coast was clear. Depending upon where he was in Meanwhile Gardens, he could slip down to the pond and hide in the reeds or—which was better—he could run for the abandoned barge beneath the canal bridge and there he could hole up under a crisscrossed pile of rotting timbers. On the Harrow Road, he could dash to the charity shop and hide in the back room where their aunt kept bins for the clothing that was still to be sorted.
Joel took his brother to each location time and time again. He said, “I’m the headhunter. Run!” and he gave Toby a shove in the correct direction. He kept this up until the sheer repetition of the exercise took Toby’s legs to the correct hiding places.
During all of this, Neal Wyatt and his crew kept their distance. They gave no trouble to either Joel or Toby, and Joel was beginning to think that they’d actually moved on to tormenting someone else when they resurfaced, like hungry sharks returning to their feeding area.
What they did was follow. They took this up one day as Joel walked Toby to the learning centre. They emerged from a video shop across the road, and when Joel first saw them, he was certain they would vault the railing, dash through the traffic as they’d done before, and chase him and Toby down. But instead, they kept their distance across the street, stalking along the pavement and making soft hooting noises, as if they were signalling someone to jump out of one of the shops that Toby and Joel passed.
When he saw them, Toby grabbed the leg of Joel’s trousers, saying, “There’s dem blokes’t broke my lava lamp,” and he sounded frightened, which he was.
For his part, Joel stayed as calm as he could and merely reminded his brother about jungle explorers and headhunters, asking him, “Where’d you run, Tobe, if I wasn’t here?”
Toby responded correctly: to the charity shop, to the back room, into those bins, and no stopping to tell Aunt Ken what he was doing.
But Neal and his crew didn’t do anything more than follow and hoot on that day. On subsequent days they merely followed, doing their best to unnerve their quarry. Surprise was well and good for some kinds of contests. But for others, psychological warfare worked better to soften up the foe.
That was exactly what it did to Toby. After four days of being trailed by the silent crowd of boys, Toby wet his trousers again. It happened right on the steps of Middle Row School where he was obediently waiting for Joel. As Joel came round the corner from the bus, he saw Neal and his crew directly across the street from the school, gathered around a pub called the Chilled Eskimo, their eyes fastened on Toby.
Nothing in Joel’s experience had prepared him for such a degree of extended cleverness on the part of these boys. This type of individual he’d previously seen as the kind to jump, to clobber, and then to run. But now he understood that Neal was quite clever. There was a reason, then, why he was the one to run the crew.
Additional wisdom was called for: another way to handle the situation. Kendra
could not be spoken to about it lest she worry even more. Ness—a peculiar change having come over her—was too involved with the drop-in centre. Dix was out of the question, as was Carole Campbell. That left Ivan Weatherall.
Joel went at it through verse, which he gave to Ivan the next time he saw him.
Walking out he is, his poem began, blood and hurting heavy on his mind.
Ivan read it during their mentoring session at Holland Park School, where they still met as they’d done during the previous term. After he’d read the poem, Ivan spoke for a few minutes about emotive language and artistic intentions—as if he and Joel were at Wield Words Not Weapons or at the poetry class Ivan offered at Paddington Arts—and after a bit, Joel thought he meant to ignore the subject of the poem altogether.
Finally, though, Ivan said, “This is it, I dare say.”
“What?”
“Why you’ve not taken the microphone at Wield Words. Why you don’t participate in Walk the Word either.”
“I still been doing poems.”
“Hmm. Yes. And that’s to the good.” Ivan read Joel’s piece another time before he said, “So exactly who is he? Are we speaking of Stanley? This is a fairly apt description of what appears to be his frame of mind.”
“The Blade? Nah.”
“Then…?”
Joel reached down and retied his shoe, which didn’t need retying. “Neal Wyatt. You know.”
“Ah. Neal. That altercation in Meanwhile Gardens.”
“There’s been more stuff. He’s vexin Toby. I been tryin to think what to do to stop him.”
Ivan set the poem on the table. He lined it up with the edge precisely, which allowed Joel to notice for the first time that Ivan’s hands were manicured, with trimmed and buffed nails. In that moment, the vast difference between them became emphasised. Joel saw those hands as extensions of the world in which they lived, one where Ivan Weatherall—for all his good intentions—had never known labour in the way that Joel’s own father had known it. This lack of knowledge created a chasm, not only between them but between Ivan and the entire community. No poetry event could span that chasm, no classes at Paddington Arts, no visits to Ivan’s home. Thus, before the white man responded, Joel had a good idea what he would say.
“Neal’s abandoned his art, Joel. Piano would have fed his soul, but he wasn’t patient enough to find that out. This is the difference between you. You have a greater means of expression now, but he does not. So what’s in here”—this, with a fist to his heart—“is experienced here”—the same fist lowered to the paper on the table. “This gives you no reason to strike out against others. And you’ll never have a reason while you have your verse.”
“But Toby,” Joel said. “I got to stop them vexin Toby.”
“To do that is to engage in the circle,” Ivan said. “You do see that, don’t you?”
“What?”
“‘Stopping them.’ How do you propose to do it?”
“They need sorting.”
“People always need ‘sorting’ if you insist upon thinking within the box.”
Circles. Boxes. None of it made sense. Joel said, “Wha’s that s’posed to mean? Toby can’t defend himself ’gainst those blokes. Neal’s crew’s waitin for a moment to get him, and if dat happens…” Joel squeezed his eyes shut. There was nothing more to say if Ivan could not imagine what it would be like for Toby should Neal’s crew put their hands on him.
Ivan said, “That’s not what I meant.” They were seated side by side, and he pulled his chair closer to Joel’s and put his arm around Joel’s shoulders. This was the first time he’d ever touched the boy, and Joel felt the embrace with some surprise. But it seemed like a gesture meant to comfort him and he tried to take comfort from it, although the truth of the matter was that nothing would truly be able to soothe him until the problem of Neal Wyatt was seen to. “What appears to be the answer is always the same when it comes to dealing with someone like Neal. Sort him out, have a dustup, give him a taste of his own medicine, do unto him exactly what has been done to you. But that perpetuates the problem, Joel. Thinking within the box of doing what’s always been done does nothing more than keep you going round the circle. He strikes, you strike, he strikes, you strike. Nothing gets resolved and the matter escalates to the point of no return. And you know what that means. I know you do.”
“He’s set to hurt Toby,” Joel managed to say although his neck and his throat were stiff with holding back everything else that wanted to come out of him. “I got to protect—”
“You can do that only up to a point. After that, you’ve got to protect yourself: who you are at this moment and who you can be. The very things Neal himself can’t bear to think of because they don’t gratify what he wants right now. Strike out at Neal for whatever reason, Joel, and you become Neal. I know you understand what I’m talking about. You have the words inside you and the talent to use them. That’s what you’re meant to do.”
He picked the poem up and read it aloud. When he was done, he said, “Not even Adam Whitburn wrote like this at your age. Believe me, that’s saying a lot.”
“Poems ain’t nuffink,” Joel protested.
“Poems,” Ivan said, “are the only thing.”
Joel wanted to believe that, but day after day in the street proved otherwise and Toby’s retreating into Sose—communing with Maydarc and afraid to leave the house—proved even more. Joel found himself ultimately at the place he never thought he’d be: wishing that his little brother could be sent away to a special school or a special place where, at least, he would be safe. But when he asked his aunt about the paperwork that Luce Chinaka had sent home to have filled out and what this paperwork might mean for Toby’s future, Kendra made it clear that no one was going to scrutinise Toby for love or money or anything else.
“And I expect you can work out why,” she said.
So the long and short of it was that Toby was going nowhere and now he was afraid to go anywhere. In Joel’s world, then, something had to give.
There turned out to be only one solution that Joel could see if he wanted to act in a way that existed outside the box, which Ivan had described. He was going to have to get Neal Wyatt alone. They were going to have to talk.
Chapter
17
While all of this was going on with Joel, Ness’s experiences were taking an unexpected turn, beginning on the very day of her humiliation at the hands of the security guard. Had anyone told her that the result of this degrading situation would be friendship, had anyone told her that the person with whom she would come to form that friendship would be a middle-aged Pakistani woman, Ness would have called the person making that prognostication exceedingly stupid, although she probably would have phrased it in a far more colourful fashion. But that was exactly what occurred, like a slowly budding flower.
This unlikely friendship began with Majidah’s invitation—or perhaps, better said, her order—to Ness to accompany her home on the day she’d shown up at the child drop-in centre late, from Kensington High Street. They did not go directly there, however. Instead, they began with some necessary shopping in Golberne Road.
Ness went along with trepidation hanging over her. She understood perfectly that Majidah held her future in her hands: One phone call from the Asian woman to the Youth Offending Team—in the person of Fabia Bender—would be sufficient to toast her properly. In the market area, she felt that Majidah was toying with her, prolonging the moment before she lowered the boom, and this provoked a typical and very Nesslike reaction. But she managed to hold in her fury as Majidah did her shopping, knowing that it was better to wait to display it until they were not in a public forum.
Majidah went first to E. Price & Son, where the two antique gentlemen helped her with her selection of fruit and veg. They knew her well and treated her respectfully. She was a shrewd buyer and took nothing from them that she did not inspect from every angle. She went next to the butcher. This was not any butcher, but one that
sold only halal meats. There, she placed her order and turned to Ness as the butcher was weighing and wrapping. She said, “Do you know what halal meat is, Vanessa?” And when Ness said, “Summick Asians eat,” she said, “This is the limit of what you know, is it? What an ignorant girl you are! What is it that they teach in school these days? But of course, you have not gone to school, have you? Sometimes I do forget how foolish you English girls can be.”
“Hey, I’m takin a course now,” Ness told her, “over the college, an’ the magistrate even approved it.”
“Oh yes indeed. A course in what? Tattoo drawing? Rolling one’s own cigarettes?” She scrupulously counted out a collection of coins to pay for the halal meat, and they left the shop with Majidah waxing on the topic, which was obviously dear to her heart. She said, “Do you know what I would have made of my life, had I had the opportunities for education that you have, you foolish girl? Aeronautical engineering, that is what I would have learned. Do you know what that is? Never mind. Do not further display your appalling ignorance to me. I would have made planes fly. I would have designed flying planes. That is what I would have done with my life had I the opportunity to be properly educated, as you have. But you English girls, you are given everything, so you appreciate nothing. This is your trouble. What you aspire to is shopping on the high street and purchasing those ridiculous high heels and pointy-toed boots that look like witch shoes. And silver eyebrow rings. What a waste of money all of that is.” She paused. Not for breath but because they’d come to a flower seller, where Majidah inspected the blooms on offer and selected three pounds’ worth.
As they were being wrapped, Ness said, “An’ these i’n’t a waste of money? Why’d ’at be, exackly?”
“Because these are things of beauty made by the Creator. High heels and eyebrow rings are not. Come along please. Here, then. Be useful. Carry the flowers.”
She led the way into Wornington Road. They passed the sunken football pitch, which Majidah looked at in some disgust, saying, “This graffiti…Men do this, you know. Men and boys who ought to have better things to do with their time. But they have not been brought up to be useful. And why? Because of their mothers, this is why. Girls like you, who pop out babies and care for nothing but purchasing high heels and eyebrow rings.”
What Came Before He Shot Her Page 37
